Whenever I travel, I have a very loose approach to packing my stuff. Mostly, I pack in less than 20 minutes – regardless if I’m going away for a night or three weeks. There are four checks: Passport, tickets, credit card, and camera.
It’s just the way it goes, you can’t get by without either of those items (except perhaps tickets, if you are travelling with an airline who has embraced eTickets). If your journey is especially designed for photography, however, the task may be slightly different.
Today, via the bottomless resource that is the Travel Photography Blog, I found Jay Hargett’s amazing Travel Photography Tips article.
It touches on all the major topics, including preparation, what and how to pack, travel photo composition, safety, security, etc. And just when you thought you knew everything there was to know about the topic, the comments start. What can I say, Photo.net is read by some amazing people. Page upon page of witty, clever, and downright genius suggestions, tips, tricks, and advice.
Well worth a read!
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Photocritic runs on WordPress, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It’s easy to use, easy to customise, doesn’t cost a penny, and can be made to look quite good.
So, you’ve chosen which blog you’re going to use. Now, if you don’t have a website already, I would strongly recommend setting up two blogs right from the start – one for every blog entry you do, and one for photos you are particularly proud of.
I know I wank on about things at great length about all and sundry in this particular blog, but that’s because I’m fond of writing. I’m fond of photography, too, of course, but that’s not the point – the point is that even if you don’t write a single word, you can still create a photography blog that is useful to yourself.
Peterson skips the basics and the theory behind exposure – for which I’ll be forever grateful, because frankly, it’s not that exciting. Instead, the whole book is filled with a vast number of breathtakingly gorgeous photographs (about 160 pages worth, which means around 150 photographs or so, I think), and a fair chunk of text.
The best way to use the book is probably to leaf through it, find a photograph you like (and you’re bound to find many), and then read the description to learn how it’s done.
I’ve done canvas printing a few times before, but I figured I’d give it another go in order to create a present for someone who’s got a birthday coming up (so if you are my sister, stop reading now. If you know my sister, don’t tell her, because that’d just be cheating).
Enfin, I was shopping around for a decent printing site when I came across 
My initial idea was to go to town on the print with thick, translucent lacquer. By adding a layer of brush strokes, I figured, the photograph could turn into a half-painting.
I make little secret of my dislike for microstock, as re-iterated in my ‘
The counter-argument put forward by Microstock agencies is you will make-up lost income on a higher quantity of sold images. Ultimately, it’s all down to how much you earn in the long run. Say you need an income of $2000 per month, for example – does it matter if you sell 2 photos at $1000 a piece, or 1000 photos at $2 a piece?
Take a look at those choices. In effect, 1 is illegal, 2 is brutally expensive (and not always possible – a grocery shop might not actually always sell dew-fresh tomatoes, but might still wish to use pictures of them on their website), 4 is probably impossible because photography is quite difficult, and, again, you may not have what you actually want photographed.
Bruce Livingstone created the first Microstock company iStockPhoto in 2000, and sold it to Getty six years later for a mind-melting $50 million USD. The cynical would say that he was the only one who got rich of micro stock, but they’d be wrong.
The big bucks microstockers feel they are missing comes down to $40,000 to $24,000 per year. These amounts are well within the range of any professional Microstocker to make. The survey also found that photographers that reported the majority of their income came from RF stock sales earning on average were $63,200 from this licensing model. For the photographers that reported the majority of their income came from RM stock sales the average was $38,500 in stock sales.
The professional Microstocker has much larger portfolios and higher download rates, though: “I define a professional Microstocker as someone with an average portfolio of 1000-10,000 images and an average download rate of about 30-250 images per day.”, Thomas says.
At iStockPhoto a large file goes for $10 USD, a Gold level exclusive member would receive $3.50 USD or 35%. “Corbis licenses a 2 MB file for $140 USD of this I am guessing the photographer get about 20%, or $28 USD.”, Thomas estimates. “I have no way of knowing what the true commission is, but I know Getty pays a 20% commission. I can find no reason to believe Corbis would pay much higher.”
So, what makes a good microstock photo? 
When asked how good a photographer he is, Thomas jokes that he’s a “fucking rock star”, but once the laughter dies down, he admits he’s no better than many other photographers out there. “I am a grinder like 90% of the photographers working. I am passionate about photography and love my job. In my group of photo friends, I am the person who can light anything. In the end, I will let the images speak for themselves.”
I like to think that I’m pretty decent at recognising cameras (I smile and nod whenever I meet anyone who carries a 40D, just like me, and I growl (only slightly) when someone’s looking smug, carrying a
My back-story in two sentences: I started off in audio, and then moved to video/film. I’ve done 3 short films and been an amateur photographer all along. I’d been photographing the urban jungle for awhile and thought I was finally getting some shots that were good enough to be put in front of other people. Pompous? Maybe. Completely clueless? Yeah, that’s more accurate.
Getting ready for exhibition
Next is framing. Yes, I had to provide my own frames and that seems to be commonplace. I had quite a few 8″x10″, and some 13″x19″ photographs I’d printed up. Framing can be costly, but I chose to do it on the cheap. I chose Hobby Lobby for the 8×10. I bought the $2 plastic frames with glass front. What I did to make the look “artsy” was turn the backing around. It has more of a corrugated board look that worked well for my city shots.
Lessons learned
“I was lucky to find a spot in Hunter Square that suited me really well: a north-west facing plain wall close to the main action of the madness of the Royal Mile during the Fringe, but tucked away between a portacabin on one side and a big tourist information map on the other.”, Katie recalls. She did two sessions of photographs, and made sure that the tripod stayed in the same place throughout the shoot. “I wanted a consistent viewpoint and scale”, she comments.
In the beginning, Katie spent a lot of time people-watching before carefully selecting her subjects. “I was looking looking for people who weren’t in a mad hurry or a large group”, she explains. Picking someone out of a crowd is easy, of course – the difficult bit is what comes next: Asking them if they want to be photographed. “I had huge waves of shyness, and a fear of being creepy. I kept seeing fascinating people, but not having the courage to ask them to stop for me, partly because I was fretting they would take it the wrong way.”
Katie believes that perhaps it helped to use an odd-looking camera. “at least some people wanted to know what that was all about, and why on earth I’d choose to use such an old-fashioned monster”.
Normally, you spend a fair bit of time getting under the skin of your models, in order to get to know them, and to find a way how you can best show them off. That, unfortunately, is not a luxury that’s afforded to a photographer working in the hustle and bustle of a busy festival.
Once again, the camera format helps: Once the focusing is set, there’s no reason to be standing behind the camera anymore. “It’s easier to get a connection with someone when you don’t have a camera stuck to your face.”, Katie notes.
I imagine that most readers of this blog are regular users of digital cameras – our 
Being part of a festival could have been easily accomplished by not bothering with film in the camera – that would have made an entirely acceptable performance art piece, for example: “I think I’d have been happy even if the photographs themselves had been a washout, because the experience and the process was so enjoyable, and I learned a huge amount by doing it.” – but Katie is a photographer at heart, and the final results will be the memories that out-live all others from the day. As she admits: “Getting some good pictures out of the endeavour was a massive bonus”. So how, exactly, do you go about getting a good photo under that kind of pressure?
The site is a bloody good good source of inspiration – have a click-about, and explore the wonderful world of creative photography – as I said, the